Francis Marion Crawford (August 2, 1854 – April 9, 1909) was an American writer noted for his many novels, especially those set in Italy, and for his classic weird and fantastic stories.
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Crawford died at Sorrento on Good Friday of 1909 at Villa Crawford of a heart attack. It was the ten-year result of a severe lung injury that happened (inhalation of toxic gases at a glass-smelting works in Colorado) on his American lecture-tour during the winter of 1897-1898. He was gathering technical information for his historical novel Marietta (1901), that describes glass-making in late medieval Venice.

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Very little was known about George, the Dalmatian, and the servants in the house of Angelo Beroviero, as well as the workmen of the latter's glass furnace, called him Zorzi, distrusted him, suggested that he was probably a heretic, and did not hide their suspicion that he was in love with the master's only daughter, Marietta. All these matters were against him, and people wondered why old Angelo kept the waif in his service, since he would have engaged any one out of a hundred young fellows of Murano, all belonging to the almost noble caste of the glass-workers, all good Christians, all trustworthy, and all ready to promise that the lovely Marietta should never make the slightest impression upon their respectfully petrified hearts.

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